Character order in Font Book is odd

[AlsoScratch]

Why is capital H first? And what's up with the other letters that are out of order?

[nifanic]

Hamburgevons

[AlsoScratch]

I don't see any sign of that.

[nifanic]

That's what characters JetBrains people started to design font from.

"Hamburgevons" is an array of chars used in font design to evaluate font's look-n-feel.

Why does the order of chars matters for you? Trying to be difficult? 🙃

[AlsoScratch]

Font Book is the macOS font preview app. It has a view where you can see the characters in the font. Normally you'd expect it to be A B C D E and so on.

But in JBM we see that capital H is out of place with the rest of the letters. Then it's followed by n p o i l O h k g.

I don't see the slightest bit of "Hamburgevons" in the order.

[AlsoScratch]

Can anyone explain why the letters don't appear in a way that makes sense? Perhaps you can consider Unicode order?

[philippnurullin]

@AlsoScratch This is a bug of Font-Lab (editor in which JetBrains Mono is made). When creating a font in this editor it assigns the Post-Script numbers to glyphs in order of creation, with no future possibility of changing it.
I'm researching the ways to get rid of it, but because its don't influence any important experience the priority is low.

[AlsoScratch]

How feasible is Unicode order?

[philippnurullin]

@AlsoScratch Right now i see 2 options:

• Rebuild font in new files from scratch by manually creating glyphs in right order, & paste the contour after.
• Try to switch to another font editor. Glyphs for example.

Both are problematic.

[AlsoScratch]

I know nothing about Font Lab, but shouldn't there be some setting to sort by Unicode or something? If not, maybe you could request it to them as a feature?

[nifanic]

I think, this is the order designers started to draw the letters in Font Lab. As far as I know, it's impossible to change the order after the font is complete.

When working on my fonts, I was experiencing the same problem when pasting drawn letters from Illustrator to Font Lab strictly in the order of appearance. Haven't tried current, 7th, version of Font Lab. Maybe now the order is changeable.

The order of appearance is not a problem. I think, you are asking a little bit too much for a free font.

[AlsoScratch]

Sometimes I want to be able to copy characters from Font Book but this strange order can make it difficult to know where the desired character is.

Nevertheless, I hope the newest version will have that feature.

[philippnurullin]

FontLab added function to sort glyphs, just didn't know this was fixed.
Will be fixed in v1.0.5.